WeTried Translations

Translator/Editor: Haruto

Discord: https://dsc.gg/wetried

◈ The Dark Fantasy Doctor Was Mistaken for a Saint ◈

Chapter 77: Good Healer (5)

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* * *

It had been delayed slightly because of the unexpected emergency patient.

But Ayla’s clinic field trip finally began.

“Student Ayla. Today, I’ll explain exactly what healers do.”

There was one thing to keep in mind.

I could not expect her to understand medical knowledge.

Think about it.

Ayla was a High Division seminary student who had awakened divine power less than two days ago.

She would not begin seriously studying medicine until she entered the Healing Studies Department in the Academic Division.

At the moment, she knew only the religious teachings she had learned at the seminary.

Would a child like that be able to absorb information about blood vessels and nerves?

Of course not.

You only see what you know.

Even if I taught her serious medical knowledge here, none of it would stay with her.

So for the time being, I planned to teach her only the most basic things.

“There are apprentices of other healers at this clinic too. Some have already entered the Healing Studies Department. They may become your seniors or classmates, so you should greet them when you meet.”

“Yes!”

As I led Ayla to another area, I confirmed one thing.

“Before I properly begin the tour, Student Ayla, do you know how other treatment centers operate?”

“I sometimes bring lunch boxes to my mother’s treatment center, so I know a little.”

“I see.”

That would make things much easier to explain.

“Good. Then let me start by telling you this clinic’s purpose.”

I led her toward the entrance.

“Each sector has several types of clinics. Their work is not drastically different, but every clinic has its own specialty.”

In the past, this one clinic had to handle every kind of patient.

Pregnant women, children, trauma patients, internal medicine, surgery, and more.

A small boarding house had to serve as a general hospital.

That naturally created inefficiency.

So when I built clinics throughout the sectors, I put more effort than anything else into dividing their responsibilities.

“The D-1 Clinic in D Sector mainly handles emergency care, trauma, and difficult cases.”

The D-2 Clinic specialized in maternity and pediatric care.

The D-3 Clinic specialized in chronic illnesses.

The D-4 Clinic specialized in infections.

I also made sure every sector had at least one clinic with a specialty.

“We’ll look at each one in detail over the course of a year.”

I intended to visit all those clinics over the next year anyway.

I turned right at the entrance.

A sign hung on the door to a small room.

Emergency Room.

“Have you ever heard of an emergency room, Student Ayla?”

“No. I’m not sure what that is.”

“Good. Then I’ll explain what an emergency room is first.”

Emergency rooms did not exist in this era.

When an emergency patient appeared, they simply laid them beside hospitalized patients.

Perhaps that was why healers and healer candidates always reacted the same way when I first introduced an emergency room.

Just like Ayla now.

“This is...?”

Ayla tilted her head.

When a patient arrived at a treatment center, there were only two possible outcomes.

They were healed.

Or their illness was incurable.

Because divine magic existed, this was a world where emergency patients often walked out on their own two feet just seconds later.

Naturally, the existence of an emergency room felt unfamiliar to them.

“Is it different from an inpatient ward?”

“Yes. Some patients have less time than others. This is where we sort those patients and provide initial treatment so they can be transferred to other clinics.”

The emergency room, which occupied half the first floor of the D-1 Clinic, had ten beds.

Each bed had an instrument stand, and a board for recording the patient’s condition hung at its head.

Three beds were occupied at the moment.

A laborer with a broken arm.

An elderly patient brought in with abdominal pain.

And the fall victim I had operated on earlier.

That patient would soon be moved up to the inpatient ward on the second floor.

“Divine power is a limited resource. Someone may die unless they receive divine magic today, while someone else can afford to wait two days. This place buys those people time.”

The surgery I had just performed was a perfect example.

If an emergency patient like that arrived at an ordinary treatment center, they would pour divine power into them.

Leaving aside whether that treatment was effective.

The real problem came afterward.

The healer often had no divine power left to treat the next patient.

They could only watch patients die while twiddling their thumbs.

That was the result of healers clinging to the miracle of divine magic and obsessing over complete recovery.

“If we use only enough divine power to keep the patient alive, we can keep three more patients like that alive today.”

So I changed the order.

Instead of pouring forty units of divine power into one person each day,

I gave ten units of divine power to each of four people over four days.

With the first method, one person survived, while the three who came afterward had to be abandoned.

With the second, all four could survive over four days.

I had only changed the order.

Yet the same resources increased the survival rate fourfold.

“It’s not that remarkable. It’s just a simple change in perspective.”

Ayla looked at me as though she had been struck by a hammer.

It was a familiar reaction.

The healers who first came here.

Their apprentices and seminary students.

They all reacted this way when they heard about the emergency room.

I did not think it was worth reacting that strongly.

Still, seeing that reaction always made me feel oddly proud.

“Next, let’s go to the operating room.”

The operating room connected not only to the entrance, but also to the emergency room.

When we entered, a healer was in the middle of surgery.

“A fracture patient.”

The patient had come to the emergency room after their leg had been crushed beneath a carriage.

The healer was preparing tools for the operation one by one.

Careful not to touch any of the surgical instruments, I explained from a distance.

“Every operating room and treatment room has holy water and religious symbols.”

It was a measure to save even a little divine power.

A pure white statue was mounted on the operating room wall.

It was a statue of the Saintess of Mercy, the sort found in treatment rooms at the cathedral.

Holy water flowed down from the statue’s feet and beneath the operating room floor.

Inside that white room, two healers placed the fracture patient on the bed.

“Watch carefully, Student Ayla.”

The patient’s leg was in terrible condition.

The wound was contaminated with dirt, and bone protruded through the skin.

It was an open fracture.

“What treatment do you think that patient needs, Student Ayla?”

“The wound is beneath the skin, so I think a high-grade Heal would be necessary.”

“Let’s see.”

The healer anesthetized the patient’s wound.

Then they washed away the mud with diluted holy water.

Dark red blood and brown mud tangled between the torn flesh washed away.

Soon, crushed muscle tissue was exposed, hanging loose.

“Ugh.”

Ayla briefly tensed her shoulders.

But perhaps because she had already made it through watching a brain surgery, she quickly regained her composure.

The healer then disinfected the wound.

And instead of reaching for a brass cross, they reached for a scalpel.

“Student Ayla, do you know what usually happens if you cast Heal on a wound in that condition?”

“I’m sorry. I don’t know.”

“If you regenerate a wound while contaminated or necrotic tissue remains, that tissue interferes with the wound’s recovery.”

Of course, the miracle of divine magic could ignore such a minor problem and heal the wound.

It would simply consume more divine power.

“As I said in the case of the brain surgery patient today, divine magic regenerates. It does not remove.”

That was why they scraped away rotten tissue, pus, and every kind of contamination before casting Heal.

Debridement.

In modern medicine, it was a technique used to prevent infection and promote wound recovery.

A single debridement could save divine power.

“It took some work to teach the healers where they needed to cut.”

Debridement was not simply a procedure where you cut away everything except the tissue with the prettiest color.

Would this tissue survive?

Would it soon die?

You had to carefully remove it while considering the location of blood vessels, blood flow distribution, and even nerves.

The most difficult part was removing tiny bone fragments and marrow that were hard to see.

Well, even if they cut away a little too much in this world, Heal could fix it somehow, so it was less difficult than in my previous life.

“Once you clean the wound like that before applying divine magic, it consumes less divine power and requires a lower level of skill.”

As I explained, I noticed a slightly dangerous area.

“Teacher. I think that’s a nerve, not a tendon.”

“Ah! I’m sorry!”

“Wait a moment.”

I washed my hands and briefly joined the operation.

It looked difficult enough that they could use some help.

“This patient has a variation in their nerves and blood vessels. A nerve normally should not pass through here. Record it. You could write a paper about it for the medical community later.”

Scrape, scrape, scrape.

I used a curette to scrape away the rotten tissue.

“Cut the healthy flesh in the shape I marked too. When you graft it, it needs that shape for the blood vessels to distribute properly.”

I performed additional excision with grafting in mind.

Once I had finished the debridement to some extent,

I stepped away from the operating table and returned to Ayla.

“I’m sorry. Let me finish explaining.”

By then, the healers had put down their scalpels.

Next, they began hammering nails into the bone.

Tap! Tap!

They were securing the broken bone with an iron plate.

“They’ll temporarily fix the bone like that. Low-grade Heal cannot reconnect bones or nerves, so we have to rely on natural healing.”

After fixing the bone,

the healers put down their hammers and nails, then picked up brass crosses.

The two took turns casting low-grade Heal.

Blood vessels and some tissue regenerated.

As soon as they confirmed the blood vessels had fully regenerated, they stopped casting Heal.

“Just like the previous surgery, we’ll stop here. There are still patients who need divine power.”

They would not close the wound.

Forcing a large wound closed could make it tear open instead.

So they would close it very slowly over several days.

They would pull skin and muscle from other tissue, attach it, regenerate it.

If they repeated that process, they could replace the miracle of a high-grade Heal with low-grade Heal.

Naturally, I did not explain those details to Ayla.

Grafting was still too difficult for her to understand.

Before long, the patient, whose open wound had been packed with a sponge soaked in holy water, was taken out of the operating room.

After finishing their Heals, the priests switched places with other priests and headed for the prayer room on the third floor.

Unlike mana, divine power was not a resource restored by eating well and resting.

Once depleted, it had to be replenished through prayer.

“Now then...”

When I checked the clock, it was already time for lunch.

Before buying Ayla lunch, I asked her a question.

“What do you think, Student Ayla? What are your impressions of our clinic?”

“...”

Ayla remained dazed and speechless for quite some time.

* * *

After that day, Ayla continued visiting clinics for a while.

At the D-2 Clinic, she observed obstetric and pediatric illnesses.

At the D-4 Clinic, she observed methods for treating infectious diseases.

During one visit, Ayla raised a question.

“But all these treatments must be expensive. Does the trading company cover all the costs?”

“Something like that, Student Ayla.”

Of course, we charged money.

Healers did not come all the way down here to work for free.

But the cost was not something poor people could afford.

“We charge patients as little as possible. The Merkuer Trading Company makes up the rest.”

“Then... are the clinics operating at a loss?”

“Almost all of them are.”

A few were profitable.

But the losses from the other clinics made those profits meaningless.

The expenses the trading company bore because of these clinics were far from small.

“Then why do you keep running them?”

A good question.

In fact, the executives of the Merkuer Trading Company regularly asked that question too.

People say they think differently before and after using the toilet.

Originally, the clinic support project had begun as a lesson learned from the accidental discovery of Viagra.

The purpose was to reduce the cost of clinical trials by conducting them through the clinics.

But once people saw the clinics’ losses, they began to think differently.

“Director Schun. Must we really do this?”

Whenever I received a question like that, I had one line of reasoning to persuade them.

“Student Ayla, what do you need to develop medicine?”

“Knowledge...?”

“Yes. You need knowledge. But knowledge does not appear out of thin air.”

Knowledge did not come from digging in the ground.

It all came from data.

And in terms of data, the clinic support project occupied a very important position.

“Patients can receive treatment cheaply because they allow us to use their information as we see fit.”

The clinics did not provide such treatment for no reason.

Patients’ places of residence. Family relationships.

What they ate, what work they did, and whom they met.

What they did years ago, and what they planned to do days from now.

They received this treatment in exchange for providing all that personal information and allowing us to handle it as we pleased.

Incidentally, some people were reluctant to hand their information over to spellcasters because of black mages.

Yet they found nothing strange about telling clergy everything from trivial details of their daily lives to their secrets.

Perhaps it was because the concept of confession was deeply rooted in everyday life.

They did not mind giving personal information to a clinic staffed by healers at all.

Well, we would keep their secrets just as strictly as in confession, so perhaps they were not entirely mistaken.

“What? You use that to replace the cost?”

But Ayla tilted her head as though she was not convinced by that explanation alone.

Perhaps because this was an era that did not understand the importance of personal information, she did not seem to grasp the value of data.

So I gave her the reasoning that had decisively convinced the trading company president and the other Directors.

“Student Ayla. To make medicine, you need to know which patients have which symptoms, right?”

“Yes. Of course.”

“But imagine that most of those patients only come to our clinics. Could a trading company other than ours truly make medicine?”

We had bought patient data cheaply.

Of course, one patient’s data might not be worth much.

But what if that became dozens, hundreds, or most patients?

Other trading companies would be unable to produce pharmaceuticals without the data our company possessed.

There was a reason pharmaceutical companies in the twenty-first century formed research and development partnerships with major hospitals.

“Research and development cannot be calculated in simple numbers. But development often contains value beyond what the numbers show. Do you still think this project is useless, Directors?”

Once I persuaded them with that logic, the other Directors and the trading company president understood at once.

Our company would gain power that money could not buy.

In the end, this support project let the trading company and Director Schun gain both a good image and profit.

I felt a little guilty for exploiting the misunderstanding trope.

I felt sorry for deceiving the patients a little, but justified it by telling myself that they could receive proper, quality treatment at a low price.

“Do you understand now?”

“No... No matter how much I think about it, I still don’t understand how this benefits Director Schun. Aren’t you sacrificing too much...?”

“It’s never a sacrifice. If anything, I’m always indebted to the patients.”

Ayla seemed to have misunderstood something again.

But this was hardly the first time, so I decided to leave it alone.

“Since we’re talking about it, let me show you a representative example.”

We were about to visit a research-focused clinic.

Since data had come up, it seemed like a good place to use as an example.

“Shall we visit the D-3 Clinic today?”

* * *

The D-3 Clinic was a clinic focused on chronic illnesses.

And when it came to chronic illnesses, there were several major conditions our company managed.

Gout. Diabetes.

And erectile dysfunction.

The D-3 Clinic mainly cared for such patients and conducted research based on their data.

Our trading company collected data from this clinic and the chronic illness clinics in every sector.

Then we continuously improved medicines based on that data.

As an aside, I was gathering data in the same way for the black magic paper I was writing as Julian.

“Let’s go in.”

The D-3 Clinic had a completely different atmosphere from the D-1 Clinic.

How should I put it?

Instead of the distinctive tension of an emergency room, it carried the warm feeling of everyday life.

Elderly patients sat side by side in the waiting room with blankets over their laps.

In one corner, a healer lifted a patient’s foot to examine a wound.

“Oh, that beastfolk person?”

“Ah, the person who showed you around, Miss Ayla? They’re a patient here too.”

I also spotted Wangcho in the middle of it all.

A healer specializing in gout was giving him a thorough scolding.

Last I heard, he had thought he could get medicine more easily if I was not watching.

Not a chance.

He had ended up under the care of a healer with an even sharper tongue than mine.

“Instead of hurting like this every time, perhaps we should just cut it off once and regenerate it.”

“Eek! I’m sorry! I’ll manage it properly, so please don’t do that!”

It was a little strange to see the underworld power who ruled D Sector and E Sector acting like that.

As we passed the examination room where Wangcho was being treated, I continued explaining.

“Student Ayla, the patients here are not emergencies. They’ll come here tomorrow, the day after tomorrow, and a month from now.”

“Do the healers care for people like that every time?”

“More precisely, they manage them. What these people need is not a single miracle, but consistent care.”

Diabetes and gout were diseases that even Heal could not fix.

So they needed to be managed continuously like this.

And because they kept coming back, we could steadily collect data as well.

Among the clinics, the ones that turned a profit were usually clinics like these.

They sold medicine and collected data.

More than anything, this was where they mainly sold Viagra.

“Now then, shall we look at a diabetes patient today?”

I led Ayla deeper into the clinic.

Footnotes:

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